1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the capture and recording of the content, ownership and/or bibliographic source of documents reproduced on a reprographic device, and more particularly to the tracking of the reproduction of specified information, especially copyrighted documents, using an apparatus attachable to a wide variety of reprographic devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
Reprographic devices (by which is meant devices intended for the convenient reproduction in hardcopy form of documents, whether said documents are in paper, other hardcopy, or electronic form prior to said reproduction, including photocopiers, electronic printers, digital copiers, spirit duplicators, and the like) are used to reproduce all types of documents, including documents that should not be reproduced, or whose reproduction should be limited, tracked or controlled. One common example of the abuse of reprographic devices is the copying of published materials subject to copyright. Recently, many governments have updated their copyright laws, and worldwide efforts have been underway to develop a means by which authors and publishers can be fairly recompensed for such copying. For example, non-profit national collectives, usually referred to as Reproduction Rights Organizations (RRO's), implement copyright licensing systems and convey royalties to the authors and publishers. The RRO's derive their authority from national legislation, contracts with the authors and publishers, and bilateral agreements with other RRO's.
An RRO pursues the licensing of specific organizations (e.g., schools, governments and private enterprise). In some cases, specific permission is granted on a case-by-case basis for copying particular jobs, in return for a specific fee. More common than this transaction-based system, however, is a blanket license, which typically operates as follows. The organization agrees to pay royalties to the RRO for the reproduction of copyrighted materials by signing a license to be in effect for a specified number of years. Typically, the licensee's copier usage is then surveyed by sampling a number of locations for a statistically valid length of time, typically a month or two but sometimes up to a year.
The records of copies made during the sampling period are reviewed by the RRO to determine the percentage of copyrighted materials copied. This statistically valid percentage is applied to all copies made by the licensee in order to estimate the total number of copyright copies made by the licensee for all of its locations. The licensee pays the RRO a fixed per copy fee for estimated copyright copies for the duration of the license. Paying such fees is often preferable to the licensee than buying the publications or than continuing to make illegal copies. Of course, while such schemes are commonly applied to photocopying, they could apply to materials reproduced by other reprographic means, such as electronic printing.
In addition to the determination of copyright percentage, many RRO's track information regarding the bibliographic source and/or content of reproduced copyrighted material, e.g., title, author, publisher, type of work (prose, poetry or music, percentage which is photography etc.), from the sampled data, so that individual authors and publishers, or their organizations, can receive proper royalty payments for their works. The published works that are being copied are constantly changing, thus samplings must be repeated on an ongoing basis to ensure that appropriate authors and publishers are identified. FIG. 1 illustrates one such typical copyright compliance system.
As a result of the manual sampling techniques generally used to-date to collect sample data on copyright copying, the sampling procedure is cumbersome. The techniques typically require the copier user to complete a detailed form, or to make an extra copy of the whole copy job together with a notation of the number of copies made. A recent system available from ALLDATA Abrechnungs-und Sicherheitssysteme Gmbh of Villengen, Germany, automatically keeps track of the number of copies made in a copy job, but still requires the copier user to keyboard an ISBN/ISSN number (the standard international book and serial numbering systems), or to input it using a manual bar-code "wand" if such a code is available on the document. The need for such cumbersome techniques has had a significant impact on both the accuracy of the sampling performed and on the completeness of the information regarding the authors and publishers. Such sampling techniques require a great deal of operator intervention and are thus likely to result in the capture of less than the actual amount of copyright copying, since the copier users tend to bypass these techniques if they are required to perform anything more than minimal additional tasks. Accordingly, the RRO's, authors and publishers commonly receive less than optimal income for the copyrighted works. Further, the difficulty of the sampling techniques discourages user organizations from executing licenses with the RRO's, thus greatly reducing the RRO's potential income. If the samplings capture incomplete author and publisher information, the authors and publishers do not receive fair individual recompense; bar codes, for example, (even if available) typically only refer to the whole publication, like the underlying ISBN/ISSN, and do not identify the authors of individual articles. Finally, with systems of the ALLDATA type, it is difficult to categorize the nature of the content of the reprographic job (such as prose versus poetry versus music, or the proportion of photographic material), as required by some RRO's, again since most bar code schemes only identify an entire publication
U.S. Pat. No. 4,179,212 to Lahr, assigned to Xerox Corporation, discloses a transaction accounting system for the automated royalty accounting of copyright-coded paper documents. The complete automated transaction accounting system includes a document copier and a copier access control system including a transaction data terminal for input of transaction information such as the date of the transaction, coded copyright information such as information contained in the ISSN/ISBN number, user identification and number of copies to be produced. A decoder is provided, the output of the decoder being connected to the transaction data terminal to input the document data. In accordance with this accounting system, a document being copied must be initially coded, at the time the paper is manufactured or printed, by application of special electrically conductive coatings to one or more areas of its surface, in order for the system to recognize the document as copyright. Further, the copier itself has to be provided with a suitable decoder in order to identify the copyright-coded document. Information about the bibliographic source of the document (such as the ISBN/ISSN number) is either coded into the document, or must be input by the user, either by scanning a special bar code imprinted on the document or by keyboard entry. The system cannot be used with any document which does not have the special conductive coating, so is not applicable to the great majority of published and copyrighted documents. The system would be difficult to use with a plurality of different reprographic devices, since it requires a special document platen to sense the paper conductivity; this would make it difficult to economically install such a device for brief consecutive sample periods on many already-existing reprographic devices. Further, the system is very manual in nature, unless a bar code is applied to the surface of the document in addition to the electrically conductive coating. Finally, it is very difficult to identify the author of a particular copied portion of a publication, such as a magazine article, or to categorize the nature of the content of the portion (such as prose versus poetry versus music, or the proportion of photographic material), since most bar code schemes only identify an entire publication.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,728,984 to Daniele, assigned to Xerox Corporation, discloses a data handling and archiving system. The system first transfers a document image into digital signals and then stores the image in memory for later retrieval. An electronic printer having an image input scanner is used for scanning the documents. The printer is equipped with a recognition circuit that reads a bar or other code on the document to distinguish encoded documents from other non-coded documents. The system does not track the copying of certain documents but rather reads the special coded digital images previously placed on the input document, decodes said images and either prints a message based their content or uses their content as auxiliary software to control the printer operation.
While the related art provides a system which attempts to account for the copying of copyright-coded documents, the related art discloses no system which can be used to record information about the bibliographic source (i.e., title, author, publisher and the like) of a copyright document, unless that bibliographic source information is either specially encoded on the document in the form of conductive areas or as a bar code, or the copier user inputs said information manually or by using a manual bar-code wand. In addition, schemes such as the reading of conductive areas of the document not only require special documents but also special copier decoder components, which would make it difficult to install such a device economically for brief consecutive sample periods on many already-existing reprographic devices. Finally, it is very difficult using the related art to identify the author of a particular copied portion of a publication, or to categorize the nature of the content of the portion, since most bar code schemes only identify an entire publication.